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Offline mailbox backup & restore solution for Office 365

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The program is a desktop application that connects with your Office 365 tenant via Exchange Web Services (EWS). It reads the contents of users' mailboxes and/or public folders and creates their copy on a local hard drive. In order to connect to the source server, the person configuring the program must be a global admin in the given Office 365 tenant.

The administrator sets up backup jobs by configuring criteria in the program. He or she specifies what data should be backed up, when the backup job is supposed to be launched, and were the backup copies of mailboxes will be stored.

The program can perform a one-time backup job or backup data in cycles. During the first cycle a complete backup copy is created. It means that all items meeting the criteria defined in the job configuration are saved in the local storage. During subsequent backup cycles, incremental backup copies are created. During the incremental backups, the program scans mailboxes in search of changes in items or newly arrived items, and backs them up upon detection.

The administrator can choose to restore individual items, complete folders, or even entire mailboxes. Data can be restored to the original location, or a different folder or even Office 365 tenant.

The program can be used for testing purposes for 30 days. During that period you can run fully functional backup jobs. The only limitation of the trial version is that, while restoring data, you will be able to restore only 5 items per folder. Unless you activate the program with a license key, all backup and restore jobs will be switched off after the trial period ends.

The program’s main purpose is to give you the ability to create offline backup copies of users’ Office 365 mailboxes. Therefore, it is designed as a desktop application that saves data to local storages/hard drives. This storage model reflects the widespread legal requirement concerning data archiving, backup and recovery, according to which archived/backed up data can’t be stored by a 3rd party cloud service.

The storage size requirements are determined by the amount of data that you need to backup. The program itself doesn’t impose any storage size limits. Used and free space can be easily verified at any time in the CodeTwo Backup user’s interface.

The license for the program is sold in an annual subscription model per backed up mailbox or each 0.5 GB of public folders data on the source server. The license has to be renewed after one year. You can’t pay for the subscription monthly. Learn more on the pricing page.

If you don’t renew your subscription, you won’t be able to run backup jobs anymore. However, you will still be able to restore data already saved in your storages.

You can get additional licenses at any time using the order form. Select Additional licenses in the first step, and follow the onscreen instructions. Note that you will be asked to provide your current license key which you want to expand.

Adding licenses to your subscription does not change its expiration date. The price of additional licenses will be reduced by cost of the used period of the first subscription.

The program backs up whole Exchange Online mailboxes and public folders. All typical Exchange Online mailbox folder types and item types are supported. For more details on supported scenarios see our user’s manual.

In the current version, the program doesn’t support SharePoint Online and Lync Online backups. If you need this feature, please contact us to submit your feature request.

Yes, you can. To do this, you have to first use CodeTwo Backup for Office 365 to create a backup of the mailboxes you want to export to PST files. Then, use the Archive to PST option on the backup storage that was created in the previous step. This, in effect, will result in creating PST files for the respective mailboxes.

What's more, you can run the program to cyclically archive your backed up mailboxes to PST files. Thanks to the possibility of setting up an archive retention policy, you may decide how many recent PST archive files are to be kept on hard disks.

The program uses EWS to connect to the source Office 365 tenant and to copy the mailbox contents. The speed of data transfer can be determined by many factors, independent from the application itself, e.g. network bandwidth, EWS performance.

What is more, the program doesn’t put any limits on the size of backed up items.

The general system requirements to use CodeTwo Backup can be found on the download page and in the User's Manual. The program can be installed on any Windows computer, starting from Windows 7. In order to be able to perform a backup of Office 365 mailboxes, the computer has to be connected to the Internet (broadband connection is recommended), and the account used to log in to the Office 365 tenant has to have global admin’s rights.

Outlook rules are stored on the mail client’s side. CodeTwo Backup backs up mailbox and public folders data only. If you need to back up Outlook rules as well, please contact us to submit your feature request.

The program will help you create backup copies of important mailbox and public folders data so that you can keep it safe on your local drives. Additionally, the fact that backup copies are stored locally allows for unlimited offline access to user’s mailbox data stored in those copies.

All backups are managed centrally, so you can create backups, restore items, folders or entire mailboxes from one place.

CodeTwo Backup for Office 365 is also helpful when you need to comply with the law and keep the mailbox data to make it available for legal actions. When it is necessary, you can search for certain items and, if they were deleted, recover them.

Thanks to that, you will also be ensured that no important email or other data is damaged or lost forever – no matter whether it was deleted by accident or it was effected by malicious behavior, you will be able to retrieve every single item.